Virginia Beane Rutter

Woman Changing Woman

Restoring the Mother-Daughter Relationship

330 pages, ISBN 978-1-882670-83-3, Spring Journal

This moving and provocative study explores why woman-to-woman psychotherapy is so powerfully transforming. At its core is the archetype of the mother-daughter relationship. Under the millennia of patriarchy, women have historically been alienated from their mothers, and consequently from themselve. Beane Rutter connects the practices, myths, and archetypal images of cultures past and present to the life experiences, dreams, and therapeutic processes of three contemporary women.

Under the millennia of patriarchy, mothers and daughters have historically been alienated from one another. A woman's alienation from her mother becomes an alienation from herself, from her own empowered femininity. "Woman-to-woman psychotherapy," writes Beane Rutter, "is the ritual container for the lost feminine in our culture." In her view, the consulting room is the sacred space for women's symbolic rites of passage, to reclaim the feminine rituals attending the intimate initiatory events of a woman's life. Beane Rutter traces the emotional, physical, and spiritual journey of the "cultural heroine" who, through her individual transformation, healing and self-awareness, courageously takes up the task of all women.

Virginia Beane Rutter, MA, MS is a psychotherapist and Jungian analyst on the faculty of the C. G. Jung Institute in San Francisco. She delves into ancient myths and rites of passage through art, archaeology, and psychology. In her clinical practice, these studies coalesce around archetypal themes of initiation as they manifest in the unconscious material of women and men today. Her recent article, "The Archetypal Paradox of Feminine Initiation in Analytic Work," is a chapter in Initiation: The Living Reality of an Archetype (Routledge, London, 2007). Two earlier books, Celebrating Girls and Embracing Persephone focus on the contemporary mother-daughter relationship.